Firstly, we should note that Andorra is one of the smallest countries in the world with almost no usable land and no natural resources of any kind. It’s just mountains. It doesn’t have enough agricultural land to feed its tiny population of just 86,000. It doesn’t even have an airport.

You might have thought that a lack of resources would be a problem, but no. By contrast with the Central African Republic with its diamonds, Niger with its reserves of oil, gold and uranium, and Afghanistan, which grows almost the entire world’s heroin crop, and which are three of the world’s poorest countries, Andorra has nothing that it can dig up, chop down or otherwise exploit. So lesson number one is that wealth isn’t something that nature provides. It’s something that people create for themselves, literally out of thin air.

Andorra knows that it can’t grow its own food, generate its own electricity or defend its own borders from attack. So it doesn’t try to do any of those things. Instead it focuses on creating the wealth it needs to pay for everything it lacks.

Because the country needs to import so many goods, it imposes no import/export duties. It also imposes little or no taxes on its population and businesses, so people can just get on with working and creating employment. The population grew from 10,000 in the 1960s to 80,000 today – not through a high birth rate, but by creating jobs and allowing people to come and work in the country.

There’s also no problem with tax evasion in Andorra, because there’s little or no tax to evade.

But what, you may be asking, do people in Andorra actually do? I hope that you’ll realize by now that what they do isn’t really very important. What matters is that they have an economic framework that removes barriers to wealth creation and that allows individuals to do whatever they believe their skills and time are best spent on. People in Andorra do all kinds of interesting things, and not only are they some of the richest people in the world but they are also some of the happiest and healthiest.

Excellent article
My friend more or less responded line this when I showed him this article ..

There you are
proving ( and I don’t need to prove ) that they say Scotland can’t be independent ????
I think it’s more to do with barriers of greed and British colonialism that prevent it.
Even with nothing like the resources Scotland has Andorra manages just fine .Proving with a government who actually govern and a system that’s for the many and not the few ( the direction Scotland would like to go and should have done decades ago) that it’s perfectly possible .
Mind you they first would have to get off their back the archaic aristocratical elitist “British way “and so called values of their back first ..